Well, since we're posting trailers now, here's he new one for the upcoming Star Trek movie. Lens flair aside, I'm somewhat optimistic about this one. I enjoyed the reboot movie as a sci-fi action movie, but as a Star Trek movie, it bothered me more than a little for a number of reasons that I'm not going to get into right now. This movie seems to still have those same issues that I won't get into, but again, as a sci-fi action movie, it looks, pretty good. This new trailer has a moment right around middle where Kirk turns to the crew in a massive "oh sh*t" moment, that sort of sold me on giving it a try. Anyway, trailer time.

Star Trek had been crap for a really, really long time. The reboot is an actual attempt to cut out the aspects of the series that were consistently destroying it from within. Sure, most of these features were ones that had been a staple of the series since the 60s. But that's the point. They had been staples of the series since the 60s.

For the most part, the movie did a great job of paying homage to the aspects of ST that it was leaving behind. Remove the action from the movie, and you still get a deeply political film about cultural clashes, the effect of power, and what personhood means. And the action was actually handled extremely well. Nearly every bit of "action" in the movie actually had specific purpose, and was scaled to the actual level of intensity for the situation. The one exception I can think of is the chase scene on Delta Vega... which was put in as an homage to the campy style of the original series.

And let's just go ahead and remember that this gives them the perfect opportunity to rectify the absurd retconning of scientific concepts within the ST universe. Warp and time travel, in general, being big ones. The inconsistency with the Romulan Empire being another. I could keep going, but I want.

Star Trek's biggest problem, as a series at least, has consistently been failing to pay due diligence to its own story.

If they manage this properly, they could realistically breathe life back into the series, with regards to television.

That said, I actually DO mean if they manage this properly. There's plenty of potential for them to seriously mess this up. Getting too close to the typical ST tropes, or getting too far from them, will destroy the reboot if done this early.

I'm convinced that the establishment of the alternate timeline has rendered it possible, provided they don't ***** it up. But I don't necessarily see something like a new TNG. I envision something more like the SHIELD show that The Avengers is spawning - some kind of new experiment with the universe rendered possible by a new movie!verse.

There are enough plot lines in the ST series that run deep enough to warrant an exploration in this new universe. But I don't see it being another show based on a federation ship.

I mean, there's so much potential there now. Vulcan is destroyed, and those remaining are now refugees. What does that mean for their culture, having to interact en masse with groups who largely act on feeling, not reason? How do other groups react to them in large numbers, where they are no longer just a curiosity, but an actual emotional threat?

Maybe you have a show that's more static, like Deep Space 9? Maybe you accept that ST doesn't always need to follow the federation, and look at some of the other careers and ships that are at work in the universe? Maybe, at no point in the show, is the entire cast faced with destruction at the hands of a god-like entity?

Star Trek had been crap for a really, really long time. The reboot is an actual attempt to cut out the aspects of the series that were consistently destroying it from within. Sure, most of these features were ones that had been a staple of the series since the 60s. But that's the point. They had been staples of the series since the 60s.

This. While the movie had some issues (pretty much anything that happened on this ice planet was stoopid and Eric Bana was quite underwhelming as a villain) it did entertain me all the way through.

I liked Bana's portrayal. My feeling is that he just didn't get enough screen time. One of the deleted scenes from the movie was him in a klingon prison camp, which is where the crew apparently was for the majority of the years between the destruction of the Kelvin and Vulcan. I would have liked to see more scenes that really added to his characterization. That said, I think the scenes he DID have were extremely well tailored so you could get the most out of them possible.

Its sort of like you consistently got glimpses into his story, but it never quite bloomed. Which was really a time issue, I think. They HAD to establish the backstory for the Enterprise and its crew, which left very little time for anything else. I mean, these are characters who had hundreds of hours of screen time in the original series. Getting the non-Trekkie audience to care about them in a feature-length film was no small task.

But I actually loved them. Keith Urban is an awesome Doctor McCoy, I adore Zoe Saldana as Uhora, and I think Pegg is great as a young, "green" Scotty. Zachary Quinto definitely nailed Spock, too. And I definitely think distancing the AU Kirk from Shatner's Kirk was extremely important to making the series have any hope of making it.

Which also brings up a significant point about the movie - there's a LOT of talent here. These are actors capable of translating the obscene overacting of the ST series into a more relatable, modern context. I didn't feel like a single character was miscast, and the tone of the writing perfectly matched the new direction with the characters and the actors, and that's a BIG achievement. The writing was consistently a big part of the problem for ST, and any turn for the better is one I'm going to celebrate.

I agree with you that Bana did a good, if not great job. I always liked him since I first saw him in Chopper. But he always picks roles that don't interest me/are boring too me/are not fleshed out enough. So while I think he is an outstanding actor there is only one movie with him that I really dug. And that was Chopper.

Yeah, he's not amazing at picking roles. Or, rather, I think he has a knack for picking roles that are actually interesting, but end up with writing that's never quite there.

Take Nero - he's a simple man who is thrust into a position where he has a lot of power, a part of a culturally distinct group from the rest of the movie's major characters, loses his family and the rest of his people, etc. It's an interesting character. But too much of that is told in passing.

I think he probably needed at least two more scenes for his character to really be established - one flashback to his final moments with his family and/or losing them, and something showing his time spent in the Klingon prison, allowing him to stew in his own mind for 20+ years.

I'm convinced that the establishment of the alternate timeline has rendered it possible,

Okay, maybe I missed it when I watched the movie, or there is some external official source, but is this an alternate timeline or a reboot? I thought it was a reboot. Because if it's an alternate timeline that means there's a chance (small as it is) for a Shatner/Pine Kirk crossover movie in the future and that would be awesome.

You can throw in Picard, too.

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George Carlin wrote:

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

It is an alternate timeline. That's why the original Spock could make a short appearance. I do hope they don't make any sort of crossover because that sort of thing more often than not ends up a complete mess.

Star Trek had been crap for a really, really long time. The reboot is an actual attempt to cut out the aspects of the series that were consistently destroying it from within. Sure, most of these features were ones that had been a staple of the series since the 60s. But that's the point. They had been staples of the series since the 60s.

I'm curious what aspects you're referring to. While some of the original series was certainly aged, they'd done a pretty good job bringing the universe up to modern times with TNG and the accompanying series.

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For the most part, the movie did a great job of paying homage to the aspects of ST that it was leaving behind. Remove the action from the movie, and you still get a deeply political film about cultural clashes, the effect of power, and what personhood means.

You and I were watching different films then. To me, it was more about bringing it to an audience with a short attention span, easily distracted into thinking that overdoing character traits is good, and no real care about anything resembling a decent plot or story.

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And the action was actually handled extremely well. Nearly every bit of "action" in the movie actually had specific purpose, and was scaled to the actual level of intensity for the situation. The one exception I can think of is the chase scene on Delta Vega... which was put in as an homage to the campy style of the original series.

You're kidding, right? The film was full of "action for actions sake". Far far more than any of the previous films. What was missing was any sense of people making intelligent decisions, replaced with "charge into action, do stupid things which should kill us, but because we have plot armor, we don't". The entire drop onto the drill platform thing was not only unnecessary, it was actually stupid from a plot point of view, highlighted later when instead of doing something like that, they simply shot the **** chain. The film was chock full of really really poorly placed action choices IMO. Placed there, I'm sure, with the assumption that most moviegoers wouldn't stop and ask "Hey. Why'd they do that instead of <much smarter choice>?".

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And let's just go ahead and remember that this gives them the perfect opportunity to rectify the absurd retconning of scientific concepts within the ST universe. Warp and time travel, in general, being big ones. The inconsistency with the Romulan Empire being another. I could keep going, but I want.

And you think this film did that? A film that included time travel, incredibly variable warp travel times (far worse than any previous), transporting across light years onto a ship traveling at warp, and a complete fail when it comes to grasping basic physical facts about the universe (which don't change just because you rebooted the series btw). Oh. And they did it with a character that is representative of one of the worse "where the **** did that come from" aspects of their treatment of the aforementioned Romulan Empire. The whole subspecies that no one had heard of before introduced in ST:Nemesis was a stupid idea and frankly was so poorly received (in addition to numerous other problems with that film) that it's what killed the series off. So they decided to make one of those Romulans the lead villain in the reboot? Why? Oh dear God, why?

It's like they brought with them all the worst problems from the original, and then added in some more really poor things to boot.

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Star Trek's biggest problem, as a series at least, has consistently been failing to pay due diligence to its own story.

So the solution is to not even bother to try to write a good story? I guess that does solve the problem, but not very well.

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That said, I actually DO mean if they manage this properly. There's plenty of potential for them to seriously mess this up. Getting too close to the typical ST tropes, or getting too far from them, will destroy the reboot if done this early.

Honestly? If they can stay away from the "villain of the week" mentality, and instead focus on building a consistent and well defined universe, they'll do alright. Problem is that they chucked those parts of it out (that was honestly the one big strong point the original ST had IMO), and went with something new. Which gives them the opportunity to re-write things a bit, but they need to be really careful or they'll run afoul of exactly what killed the franchise the first time around. Instead of coming up with good stories to tell within the existing framework, they got lazy and just started trying to introduce "new things". Voyager worked (sorta) because they were traveling somewhere far away. You could introduce totally new races and whatnot without causing problems. But then they did Enterprise, and I think they wanted to do the same thing, but realized that in a prequel they were still bound by the stories that would happen later on. So they did something stupid, and instead of writing what the fans wanted (stories about the formation of the relationships between all the races and people we knew), they decided to send them off "somewhere else" (that had never been mentioned or heard of before) to fight bad guys. That killed the series. Sadly, the last season was fantastic because they finally did what the fans had been waiting for. But it was too late and the series was already slated for cancellation.

The films made the same stupid mistake with the whole "new race of Romulans" thing. Totally unnecessary. Fans wanted to see things that fit into the world, not see the existing world ignored so that some writer could place his stamp on it. Yet time and again, the folks running the franchise kept insisting on introducing "something new" and in ways that increasingly stretched believability. You can tell a good story without having to make something brand new every **** time. The best ST films did this if you stop and think about it. ST2 brought back Khan. ST4 had time travel (always good). ST6 had Klingons. ST8 had the Borg. What did the ones in between have? ST:tmp had vger (something "new", even though it was retelling of an old story). ST3 honestly just sucked for a variety of reasons. ST5 introduced "God" (and a magical barrier around the center of the galaxy, which they could get to in a few hours, and which had never been mentioned before). ST7 had plot holes the size of planets (and introduced the "nexus"). ST9 introduced a couple new species and some planet with magical abilities or something. ST10 did the whole stupid Romulans existing for no reason other than some writer wanted Romulans to be like Klingons and wedged it into the world (again for no reason at all) See the pattern? When they go off the "write a good story within existing world" template, things go poorly. Doubly so when they insist on jamming something "new" into the world in a way that quite obviously doesn't fit.

What they can do with this is explore new relationships and decisions forming over time as a result of the changes they've introduced. What they can't do: Invent new races. Completely change races. Invent new tech. Completely change tech. Change the past prior to the point it's supposed to have changed. I could probably list a lot more, but I expect them to violate some or all of them, if for no other reason that they already started off doing that.

If their intent was to clean things up, they started off really really poorly. The world they've made is far more messed up and we only have one film so far. I don't expect it'll get better. In fact, I fully expect they'll just ignore consistency and focus on action and drama and hope no one notices. But who knows? I might be surprised. ****. I'd love to be surprised. But if the first film is any indication, they're going to just keep piling more inconsistency and write increasingly less believable stories, not because that's what they planned going into it, but because that's what the film media tends to push franchises into. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't think I will be.

You seem to be laboring under the impression that this series was made for the fans. It wasn't, and they would have been stupid to do so. Firefly is a great example of why you don't make mass-market feature films out of television series. Or Nemesis is, if you'd rather a ST-specific example.

Also, the ST fandom is not generally supporting of other series. 2/3 of TNG's viewership abandoned ST shortly (as in, one or two seasons) into DS9. And neither Voyager nor Enterprise managed to actually grow their base.

And it's because they failed to be innovative and give viewers what they wanted - interesting and provocative stories, well-written and placed fan service, a new dynamic to the overarching plot line, interesting and relatable characters, solid camerawork, etc.

To its credit, Enterprise at least tried to shake things up, but it was so poorly executed, with so many head-scratching plot elements, that it's no wonder the network canned it.

But the central point remains the same. Star Trek fans are not significant enough as a driving force for these series, nor have they been since the late 80s, to actually warrant expecting a movie tailored to their particular interests. This is even true when we're discussing the Marvel movies and comic book readers. There are plenty of people in that fandom who absolutely hate the new movies. But at the end of the day, the point is that no one cares - they would never have survived servicing that group specifically.

Star Trek's only hope going forward is to reinvent itself. It's actually the only option.

I enjoyed what I did watch of DS9. But I never got into it enough to get the whole story. I liked Quark and the shapeless Security Officer... Didn't the lead black guy go crazy at the end series or something?

I enjoyed what I did watch of DS9. But I never got into it enough to get the whole story. I liked Quark and the shapeless Security Officer... Didn't the lead black guy go crazy at the end series or something?

You should look into the possibilities of Netflix. DS9 is my favorite Trek series. Interesting characters, decent action scenes, and with the whole wormhole thing, they were able to bring in lots of characters and species that didn't fit in with the rest of the Trek universe. And no, Sisko didn't go crazy near the end, though he did have some interesting alien species wondering through his head from time to tome.

I think the best part about DS9 is that it abandoned the "status quo after every episode" motif that the prior series had largely adopted (with the exception of some multi-part eps obviously) in the later seasons. It told mostly one continuous story for most of the last 2-3 seasons. I wouldn't say there are as many memorable episodes as TNG (and maybe Voyager), but the overall impression left on me by the series as a whole is definitely stronger than any of the others thanks to this story.

Ds9 really only got interesting in the latter seasons. the first couple of seasons were amongst the worst in star trek history. No one wanted to watch a broken down station where people could bairly go anywhere. Once they brought in the runabouts and then later the defiant, things started picking back up. Later in the season, you get some of the best large multi ship battles ever to occur in a tv series, and the plot actually started making sense and moving forward. that definitly helped.

Voyager had problems in terms of casting and writers at the start. The concept was cool enough, the spaceship was fun, but they kept hitting inconsistancies "oh federation technology is better than everything here except these guys with fungus hair who are totally not based on some arabic culture keep almost killing us, and every bit of advanced technology we find somehow manages to be incompatable with federation technology, blah blah blah" The later seasons after they started playing with the borg, got some different writers and made progress actually made the series one of my favorites.

Enterprise should have been better than it was. it had a decent cast, the story could have worked better than it did, but starting up right when it did, with the opening number they chose tied it too closely with the 9-11 attacks and that kept creaping into the story line (terrorists try to blow up earth repeatedly, etc) where people really wanted a science fiction escape. The weapons upgrades and capability upgrades that the enterprise needed right away as they found out how overmatched they were with everyone else didn't happen as soon as they should have, and people got bored with seeing the enterprise get its *** kicked all the time by everyone. Then they switched plots around multiple times, went off on wierd tangents for no apperent reason, and just kind of botched the show to the point where even having decent actors and effects wasn't enough to save it. It's kind of the same thing that happened to stargate universe later on.

I'd like to see them bring back an enterprise-E class based show of some sort. that won't happen now with the new movies, but I think it would do well. there really isn't a decent "space opera" show anywhere at the moment and thats a larger fan base than most people give it credit for.

This Robot Chicken clip just aired a few minutes ago on Adult Swim. Did people really hate Wil Wheaton's character on TNG that much? I enjoyed TNG, and have seen most of them, but don't remember him being that bad...

I think the best part about DS9 is that it abandoned the "status quo after every episode" motif that the prior series had largely adopted (with the exception of some multi-part eps obviously) in the later seasons. It told mostly one continuous story for most of the last 2-3 seasons. I wouldn't say there are as many memorable episodes as TNG (and maybe Voyager), but the overall impression left on me by the series as a whole is definitely stronger than any of the others thanks to this story.

I enjoyed that they really focused on the dark side of humanity in a way that I don't think any other series did.

And I think things really started getting better around the same time Sisko shaved his head and grew the beard.

I'm convinced that the establishment of the alternate timeline has rendered it possible,

Okay, maybe I missed it when I watched the movie, or there is some external official source, but is this an alternate timeline or a reboot? I thought it was a reboot. Because if it's an alternate timeline that means there's a chance (small as it is) for a Shatner/Pine Kirk crossover movie in the future and that would be awesome.

You can throw in Picard, too.

It's an alternate universe, but it was done to reboot the franchise while still keeping with the continuity of the main timeline. Spock formed the black hole with the red matter, and both he and the Narada were sucked into it, which sent them through time. The Narada emerged first, and the destruction of the Kelvin (and the damage to the Narada), resulted in several changes to the timeline, such as advances in technology after reverse engineering some of the Narada's wreckage, as well as Kirk not having his father as a role model to shape him into the individual we saw in the main timeline.

TirithRR wrote:

This Robot Chicken clip just aired a few minutes ago on Adult Swim. Did people really hate Wil Wheaton's character on TNG that much? I enjoyed TNG, and have seen most of them, but don't remember him being that bad...

Even Wil didn't like some of the writing he was given, though it was moreso when he was still a kid. One episode in particular, which sort of cemented him as a "hated" character, was the episode "The Battle". Picard, for the majority of the episode, is under the effects of a mind-altering device being controlled by a Ferengi trying to get revenge on him (Picard had killed his son during his last Stargazer mission). Despite Dr. Crusher, Data, Geordi, etc all analyzing what's going on with Picard, Wesley comes out of nowhere and mentions that he just "glanced" over at Picard's brainwaves and saw it matched wave patterns emanating from the Ferengi ship. In essence, he just "happened to notice" something that trained scientists and doctors weren't able to.

Wil liked later episodes he was in, such as "The First Duty", but he himself admitted that Wesley was terrible as a child.

This Robot Chicken clip just aired a few minutes ago on Adult Swim. Did people really hate Wil Wheaton's character on TNG that much? I enjoyed TNG, and have seen most of them, but don't remember him being that bad...

Yes, yes they did. Because there have been few characters more ridiculously annoying. Ever.